Interest in entrepreneurship education is growing over the world, especially in innovation
based economies, such as Denmark (GEM, 2010). However, we know rather little about the
outcomes of entrepreneurship education, in particular with respect to which type of course
content produces the best results (i.e. most high performing entrepreneurs) and how this
affects different types of students. There is a great variety of different views in the field of
research concerning the content and structure of entrepreneurship courses, but no
comprehensive study has yet been done in which these competing views are clearly
articulated as rivals and tested against each other. There is also a lack of programme
evaluations that use control groups and have a longitudinal design (Gorman, Hanlon & King,
1997; Karlsson & Moberg, 2011; Matlay, 2008). Those that have this setup often experience
methodological problems due to their conceptual framework (Krueger, 2009), or they have a
view of entrepreneurship that does not take into account the advancements within research
that have been made during the last decade (Sarasvathy, 2008). Thus, we clearly need to dig
deeper into this field in order to create methods and models that allow us to evaluate the
outcomes of different types of entrepreneurship courses.
In the beginning of 2011, the Danish Foundation for Entrepreneurship – Young Enterprise
initiated a research project with the aim to further our understanding of the type of impact
entrepreneurship education and different educational designs have on different types of
students. Two longitudinal surveys, one with a focus on elementary- and secondary-level
education and one with focus on tertiary-level education, will be performed and databases
with students from all levels of the Danish educational system will be created. The surveys
will use entrepreneurial self-efficacy (Mauer, Neergaard & Kirketerp, 2009) as a performance
indicator, but in order to generate robust results the development of new measurement tools is
needed. In this paper the initial phases of this project and the research design of these two
surveys will be presented. The development of a new ESE scale and the results from the pilot
surveys will also be presented.